Excerpt: Mediating the Real: Self-Reflection in Recent American Reportage by Pascal Sigg

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Pascal Sigg’s book Mediating the Real: Self-Reflection in Recent American Reportage (Transcript Publishing, 2024). Authors who would like to promote their books of or about literary journalism in the newsletter can email us at literaryjournalismsubmissions [at] gmail.com.

In 2007, the writer David Foster Wallace described contemporary US culture as “a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of.”[1]

The position that he detailed in the preface of a curated collection of the year’s best essays, Wallace essentially combines two strains of argumentation. First, he perceives a general change in a cultural reality that is somehow decisively shaped by the very ways in which reality itself is mediated. This argument is identical, by and large, to the scholarly discourse surrounding mediatization, “a meta-process that is grounded in the modification of communication as the basic practice of how people construct the social and cultural world”.[2]

Second, Wallace claims that it is imperative that the authorial communication of reality be reinvented in order to live up to the ways in which communication affects reality in general, even while mediatization plays a central role in changes being made to the social and cultural world—and even as it is decisively driven by technology. In other words, writers have to come up with ways to describe and make palpable how technological mediation affects the very reality that they themselves write about.

Analyzing the practical answers to the task outlined by Wallace is my book’s main objective. It explores how writers of reportage as Mac McClelland, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Michael Paterniti, John Jeremiah Sullivan, George Saunders, or David Foster Wallace himself, have taken on this complex challenge by way of emphasizing their own existential humanity (as media manifested in various acts of self-reflection).

First, the writers exhibit their own specific acts of mediation throughout their texts in the following four key domains: work, experience, interpretation, and transmission. Thus, they anchor both material and symbolic acts of sensemaking in their bodies and assert the specific qualities of human mediation and aesthetic experience.

Second, the writers demonstrate how their subjective sensemaking corresponds to the larger world, and how sensemaking is affected by a mediatization that occupies the core of the very real topics they write about: communing, subjectivity, and violence. In this way, these writers pit their specific human mediality against the larger processes of technological mediation that similarly shape social and cultural reality.

Importantly, I do not mean to imply that I view the challenge formulated by Wallace or the writers’ responses thereto as new. Instead, I identify the contemporary configuration of an older less explicit, albeit still very modern, authorial stance that views communicative potential in the writer’s self-reflection as a living human medium. Still, my synchronic study of nine exemplary texts (each selected for their extensive display of self-reflection published with and after David Foster Wallace) seeks to identify an intensification of authorial consciousness in reportage since the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Crucially, this intensification corresponds to a comparative increase in mediatization.

One of this study’s central claims is that one explicit literary response to mediatization can be found in the genre of reportage. This particular genre emerged in Europe during the second half of the 19^th century and had an explicitly artistic drive. Compared to literary journalism, the theorization of reportage in Europe has revolved rather explicitly around the issue of human mediation when faced with a more generally technologically mediated reality. This historical contextualization of reportage in relation to mediatization suggests that changes in media technology have historically correlated with boosts in innovation within the field of literary journalism.[3]

Hence, with the use of the generic framework of reportage, which understands its writers as witnesses, I argue that the selected writers’ self-reflective texts signify the human medium’s response to technical media’s commodification, spatialization, and anestheticization of human experience.

My theory of the reporter as human medium implies certain consequences for analyses of literary journalism as it insists on the very material processes of meaning-making in reportage depending on the very existence and presence of a physical human body as the precondition for communication. Nikki Usher has shown that reporters’ ‘being there’ amounts to a claim to place-based epistemic authority that includes the communication of what this presence means in ways not available to other social actors. “Historically”, she argues, “journalists retained this role by exercising power over the platforms people used to access news and by taking advantage of their material resources, professional practices, and routines.”[4] Consequently, when seen as human media, reporters engage in the very production of knowledge, not merely in its neutral transmission.

Taken together, then, the analyzed texts represent a specific way of a coming to consciousness as a human medium within journalism’s commercial context. Just like artists, to use Fredric Jameson’s argument, reporters act “within a mediatic system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of position on the status of the medium in question.”[5]

This kind of awakening, as a human subject within technologically mediated culture, involves a foregrounding of sensual perception, feeling, imagination, and memory in order to provide an epistemological depth by way of self-reflection that technical media alone cannot muster.

As I detail in the conclusion, the writers’ self-affirmation, as decidedly human media, can also be read as a reaction to recent developments in media technology. As kinds of supermedia that mimic humans, computers have come to shape modern Western societies and cultures with their capabilities of integrating symbolic and material acts by way of a limited reflexivity under a binary logic. Although this is never directly addressed, writers’ increased self-reflection can be interpreted as an answer to such technological mediation, given that it seeks a more humble and humane connection with readers that resists reproducibility and insists on the mediated quality and fundamental ethics of all communication about human experience.

[1] Foster Wallace, “Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report,” xxiii.

[2] Krotz, “Mediatization: A Concept With Which to Grasp Media and Societal Change,” 26.

[3] Fitzgerald, “Setting the Record Straight: Women Literary Journalists Writing Against the Mainstream,” 141.

[4] Usher, “News Cartography and Epistemic Authority in the Era of Big Data: Journalists as Map-Makers, Map-Users, and Map-Subjects,” 248.

[5] Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 162.

Pascal Sigg, born in 1983, works as a journalist in Switzerland covering media, technology and democracy for various outlets. He studied English, German and comparative literature at the Universities of Bern and Zurich. He was a visiting researcher at Boston College in 2018 and holds a BA in Journalism and Communication from the Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften.